The short courses on offer were writing for The Peoples' Friend, solving plot problems using business skills, e-books, and Manifesting Your Goals (neuro linguistic programming). Since I don't intend to write for the People's Friend and I already know the basics of e-books, it was a choice between the other two - both of which looked useful. In the end I went for the NLP course since it seemed to offer more on the getting-butt-in-chair front. All the advice on plotting in the world won't help if I can't make myself sit down to write!
In the course we discussed how the brain filters what is important to what you're doing at the time - if you're focused on something, that's what it will see. It will delete things that aren't important, which is why you can respond to someone while you're reading or writing and have no idea a moment later what they said. It will also distort things, and give them meaning where there is none. In order to make this work for you, you need to move past your goal (finish a book) to the outcome of your goal (sell a million copies, get a big house and car) - the unconscious needs to know exactly where it's going, because otherwise it chooses the quickest route to gratification (eg Candy Crush!). This will also allow it to see other methods of getting there, rather than being too fixated on the goal.
We also looked at how to deal with limiting beliefs, and setting out a timeline for achieving goals. Both of these are something I need to work on, although I suspect I need to set up a timeline for setting up my timeline!
This course had a little bit of a crossover with the Ways of Seeing course, since this was also about harnessing the subconscious and unconscious minds (these are not the same thing). Xanthe told us about the different parts of the brain and how the "fight or flight" instinct shuts down conscious thought. This is why it can be so difficult to think when confronted with something (even something actually non-threatening like public-speaking) that frightens us. The way to reverse this is do do something that requires conscious thought - puzzles, talking, reciting a poem. Xanthe then led us on a guided visualisation to talk to our inspiration, with varying results. Our homework: have another conversation later, writing with our dominant hand for ourselves and our non-dominant hand for our inspiration. I tried not to read anything into it when twenty minutes later I shut my dominant hand in a door...
Due to the late night, I skipped the workshop again to catch up on sleep. I then followed it up with another late night playing card games. You'd think I'd learn!